Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

A Novel

De: Claire-Louise Bennett

Narrado por: Claire-Louise Bennett

“Gorgeous and a little unnerving. . .Reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.”–The New York Times

A woman confronts the afterlife of intimacy, in a deeply tender novel by one of our most acclaimed and inventive fiction writers

The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept.

An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she’s loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage –a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss—make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Praise for Big Kiss, Bye-Bye

“Good old-fashioned modernist fun… The novel contains many … moments of almost febrile power, rendered in prose both gorgeous and a little unnerving. To call Big Kiss, Bye-Bye entertaining would be to do an injustice to its discomfiting depth, but reading it is a strange and wonderfully invigorating experience.”–The New York Times Book Review

“A work of extraordinary subtlety. . .Bennett displays her characteristic aversion to identikit templates of feeling and desire that distort the real emotional complexity of our attachments and aversions to other people, and especially those people who have most profoundly shaped our inner lives. . .Its visceral and unerringly convincing depictions of sexual feeling. . . capture inexpressible intensities of experience.”–Financial Times

“A writer of great linguistic inventiveness.” –The Atlantic

“A striking novel about a writer’s retreat into solitude in the aftermath of a love affair … Bennett ranges freely in register and tone, from passionate desire evocative of Ulysses’s Molly Bloom to a measured treatise on violence in cinema…. An intellectual tour de force.” –Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“The speaker’s exquisite sensibility, and her assured sense of her own perceptions, provides a throughline for the pastiche of scenes, dreams, and conversations that make up this book.… [It] reminds us that the goal of art is sometimes to see clearly and specifically what is there to be seen, with no duty to dictate its progress or its outcome. A languorously unfurling novel that rewards the reader’s attention and time.” –Kirkus